"The California Camp Fire: Reflections And Remnants"

An extraordinary coffee-table book explores the emotional interior of those who survived the Camp Fire and then looks outward at the terrible beauty wrought by the flames and heat. "Monochromatic portraits" by Chico photographer Ron Schwager are paired with fourteen verbatim accounts of those who escaped. Chico screenwriter and novelist Phil Midling writes in the prologue that the images are "beautiful in their simplicity and starkness yet also convey a rich complexity. ..."

Midling, who also provides the epilogue, writes that the second half of the book features stunning full-color patterns, "many resembling paintings of abstract art. Among the piled rubble and cindered ash, Ron was able to extract the images of devastation; contorted remnants and skeletal configurations of heat-fused plastic, steel, and glass viewed through a kaleidoscope of tertiary-like colors--odd hues of oxidized orange-rust, and red-violet, and turquoise-blue embedded within the bleak and grayish landscape."

"The California Camp Fire: Reflections And Remnants" ($45 in hardcover, self-published, from thecampfirebook.com, with local pickup and mail orders available), designed by Connie Ballou, is a masterpiece that will cause readers to pause and reflect with every turn of the page. 

A few haunting words from the accounts: "And so we had no other choice but to drive directly through the flames. ..." (Paradise High School coach Seth Roberts, 60); "I texted a goodbye message to my boyfriend who had been calling me because I really didn't think we were going to make it out alive" (Feather River Hospital security employee Tameekah Abdullah, 28). "I remember receiving texts from certain retirement homes. ... We just couldn't get the engine to that location. I knew those residents were about to be burned to death at any moment and there was nothing we could do. And we knew a lot of those people personally" (Paradise fire captain Alejandro Saise, 45).

In the color photograph section, Schwager writes that as a photographer, though he is "drawn to the chaos, my presence seems to be unobjectionable. But amongst the hive of debris removal activity I feel I am treading on hallowed ground. I feel I need to record this in some meaningful way." 

He has done so.